ED BARBER, Staff Writer, The Newport Daily Express
Sep 15, 2024

The third annual Clyde River clean up yielded 50 tires, the front end of a canoe, a children’s toy slide, and a whole lot more junk. On Saturday, 27 volunteers paddled 12 canoes and two kayaks down the river from West Charleston to Little Salem on a mission to clean one small part of the environment. 

A combination of organizations and unaffiliated volunteers worked downriver, searching for material that is not a part of the Clyde River’s natural environment. Two previous events successfully removed debris from the lower section of the river. Saturday’s event focused on a stretch of the river below a series of rapids that hadn’t been touched.

The canoe’s were provided by the Northwoods Stewardship Center. Conservation Science Director Meg Carter said this is one of the many events the Center is involved in. 

The NorthWoods Stewardship Center can be described as an educational, research, and conservation service organization, serving the communities of northern Vermont and New Hampshire since 1989.

“We partner with OCNRCD and MWA on projects,” Carter said. 

By collaborating, they are able to make significant improvements to the Memphremagog and neighboring watersheds.

MWA project manager Patrick Hurley expressed satisfaction with the number of volunteers willing to take the time to work on this project. As he tallied up the number of volunteers who signed up, Hurley included two young ladies who were certainly entertaining. They may not have pulled tires out of the muck this year, but they are great recruits for future events.

“I’m satisfied,” Hurley said of the material pulled from the river. There was so much debris it took about 90 minutes to fill the canoes. The volunteers ran out of room and had to pass over garbage. A second clean up next year will easily fill another 12 canoes.

Among the volunteers were four members of the Trout Unlimited (TU) chapter in the Northeast Kingdom, which was revitalized earlier this year after decades of inactivity. 

TU’s mission is to educate the public about water stewardship, and implement restoration initiatives throughout the NEK. Member Paul Noel (Orleans County representative on the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board) said the organization has engaged in other cleanup  and restoration projects. 

As you can imagine, they didn’t just help remove debris from the river, the TU volunteers were sharing what fish species they spied traveling down the river. 

A local landowner volunteered to take the debris to the Casella landfill in Coventry. Casella accepts the material without charge.